Islamic Marriage and Divorce in the United Kingdom: The Case for a New Paradigm

In 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams made a speech which ignited a fervent debate over Islamic divorce and the role of the shari'a councils in the United Kingdom by suggesting that English law could accommodate aspects of Islamic Law. The crux of the debate has been that Muslim women are left vulnerable through the common practice of not registering nikah unions as marriages, which has led some to suggest registration should become a legal requirement. While this would provide them some legal protection, there are features of a legally enforceable nikah that provide women with rights such as the protection of their wealth, which go beyond the provisions of the current English marriage contract. There is understandable resistance to changing the nature of marriage in English law which, while historically fluid, is rooted in a Christian framework. In this paper a new paradigm is developed to overcome these concerns. It is proposed here that the institution of marriage should incorporate nikah as a separate and different form of contractual union, just as civil partnership was originally formulated to provide a form of marriage union tailored to the specific needs of same sex couples.